بخش 1 فصل 15

New York City

March 11, 2014

XV

It is too quiet without James.

Addie never thought of him as loud—charming, cheerful, but hardly raucous—but now she realizes how much he filled this space when they were in it.

That night, he put on a record and sang along as he made grilled cheese on the six-burner stove, which they ate standing up because the place was new, and he hadn’t bought kitchen chairs. There are still no kitchen chairs, but now there is no James, either—he’s off on location somewhere—and the apartment stretches out around her, too silent and too large for one person, the high floor and the double-paned glass combining to block out the sounds of the city, reducing Manhattan to a picture, still and gray, beyond the windows.

Addie plays record after record, but the sound only echoes. She tries to watch TV, but the drone of news is more static than anything, as is the tinny choir of voices on the radio, too far away to feel real.

The sky outside is a static gray, a thin mist of rain blurring the buildings. It is the kind of day designed for wood fires, and mugs of tea, and well-loved books.

But while James has a fireplace, it’s only gas, and when she checks the cupboard for her favorite blend, she finds the box nestled at the back, but it is empty, and all the books he keeps are histories, not fiction, and Addie knows she cannot pass the day here, with only herself for company.

She gets dressed again, in her own clothes, and smooths the covers back onto the bed, even though the cleaners will surely return before James does. With a last glance at the dreary day, she steals a scarf from a closet shelf, a soft plaid cashmere with the tags still on, and sets out, the lock chiming behind her.

She does not know, at first, where she is going.

Some days she still feels like a lion caged, pacing its enclosure. Her feet have a mind of their own, and soon they are carrying her uptown.

My name is Addie LaRue, she thinks to herself as she walks.

Three hundred years, and some part of her is still afraid of forgetting. There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.

Like Peter, in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

There, at the end, when Peter sits on the rock, the memory of Wendy Darling sliding from his mind, and it is sad, of course, to forget.

But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten.

To remember when no one else does.

I remember, whispers the darkness, almost kindly, as if he’s not the one who cursed her.

Perhaps it is the bad weather, or perhaps it is this maudlin mood that leads Addie up along the eastern edge of Central Park, to Eighty-second and into the granite halls of the Met.

Addie has always had a fondness for museums.

Spaces where history gathers out of place, where art is ordered, and artifacts sit on pedestals, or hang on walls above little white didactics. Addie feels like a museum sometimes, one only she can visit.

She crosses the great hall, with its stone arches and colonnades, weaves her way through Greco-Roman and past Oceania, exhibits she has lingered in a hundred times, continues until she reaches the European sculpture court, with its grand marble figures.

One room over, she finds it, where it always is.

It sits in a glass case along one wall, framed on either side by pieces made of iron, or silver. It is not large, as far as sculptures go, the length of her arm, from elbow to fingertips. A wooden plinth with five marble birds perched atop it, each about to fly away. It is the fifth that holds her gaze: the lift of its beak, the angle of its wings, the soft down of its feathers captured once in wood, and now in stone.

Revenir, it’s called. To come back.

Addie remembers the first time she found the work, the small miracle of it, sitting there on its clean white block. The artist, Arlo Miret, a man she never knew, never met, and yet here he is, with a piece of her story, her past. Found, and made into something memorable, something worthwhile, something beautiful.

She wishes she could touch the little bird, run her finger along its wing, the way she always did, even though she knows it’s not the one she lost, knows this one wasn’t carved by her father’s strong hands, but by a stranger. Still, it is there, it is real, it is, in some way, hers.

A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.